With a more than satisfactory season now done and dusted, we are now left chewing over the cud of a seventh place League One finish and two extended cup runs.

It would have been good to have reached the play-offs, with the welcome additional revenue that a possible three games and a Johnstone's Paint Trophy final, could have brought in but ultimately the league table doesn’t lie and we must be satisfied with the team’s achievement.

You have to remember with the season starting late, we entered September having played three, lost three and were very much rank outsiders when we went to Swindon - but somehow came away with all three points and the seeds were being sown for a slow climb up the table.

Coupled with a 5-0 thumping at Everton in the Capital One Cup, after edging Charlton out on penalties, you would have been forgiven for thinking that someone up there didn’t like us.

And, I just shudder to think though had the season started on the first weekend of August, as is usual, it could have been a lot worse. So, we have the often-derided Olympic games for sparing us more ‘August pain’.

But the question begs why do we always seem to start the season so badly? Is it the hot weather, new players not gelling quickly enough, hard and bumpy pitches or a combination of the trio? Allied to the fact Leyton was a no-go area with the Paralympics in full flow, we had to play those opening games - as well as our whole pre-season - away from our spiritual home, it definitely didn’t help us.

But, it was the Johnstone’s Paint Trophy that provided us with some salvation to a hectic start, in the shape of a bye.

With the regular season three weeks old, it was probably more important for the gaffer to get his players on the training pitch and by the end of September, already having climbed to mid-table and seen off Barnet in the JPT, things were starting to look up.

Perhaps it’s a human trait, as you only tend to remember the bad things. But, bad they were in late October/early November that saw us slump at MK Dons and on the back of four straight defeats, questions must have been beginning to be asked about where we were going as a club.

However, the FA Cup wins at Gloucester and Alfreton provided a welcome fillip to our campaign and we carried this good form into our league programme with eight wins on the bounce. Although the Hull Cup defeat was a bitter pill to swallow, we got to the JPT area final and cemented our place in the top ten by the beginning of February.

Many teams might have buckled under the unrelenting Saturday-Tuesday-Saturday schedule and arguably we were running on empty especially after Southend somehow overcame us in a feisty JPT two-legger.

You could have then excused the team for completely imploding, especially with dozens of points to play for and survival still to be ensured.

But, the manager had made some astute signings at the turn of the year and Charlie MacDonald and loan man Shaun Batt proved good acquisitions. However, out of the three arrivals, the versatile Romain Vincelot - who had always looked good in his Dagenham days - was probably the signing of the season.

So after a slight blip from the Southend trophy exit, the O’s fell just short of a top-six finish, but the stats reveal only three defeats from our last 14 games which is highly commendable at any level of football. Critics though might point at two of those defeats against Scunthorpe, later to be relegated, and Colchester.

But you must also look at some of the games we won. On other occasions those successes might have been defeats against the likes of Preston at home, Swindon away, Walsall, remember Dean Cox’s halfway line strike, and the wins over then top side Tranmere and eventual champions Bournemouth. Oh - and - Ryan Brunt’s supposedly offside winner against Brentford in mid-September? After all, you can’t win them all.

And we did get lucky on numerous occasions for once and those defeats certainly even up the luck we no doubt enjoyed at times. But, ultimately, good teams make their own luck and with Kevin Lisbie’s 16 league goals, we were always going to be in the hunt.

So consequently we made a strong season’s finish. This should at the very least bode well for next season as long as the management continue to make astute signings and we don’t have another nightmare start to the new campaign.

Keep the faith,

Up the O’s.